Kiwis can’t lead the world on climate change

Wednesday, 10th March 2010

Even New Zealand’s politicians are getting cold feet on expensive pledges to fight global warming, says Roger Kerr

From North America and western Europe to east Asia and Australia, politicians are raising doubts about the costs of reducing carbon emissions to combat climate change. But who would have thought that even in New Zealand, which likes to parade its environmental credentials, global warming is no longer cool?

Overseas observers will have noticed that the Land of the Long White Cloud periodically gets an urge to ‘lead the world’ in some area of public policy. Often politicians and diplomats talk grandly of the country ‘punching above its weight’.

New Zealand has made many deluded (as well as admirable) attempts to lead the world. In the 1970s the architects of our misbegotten state monopoly, no-fault accident compensation scheme regarded it as a pioneering innovation that Australia and other countries would quickly follow. Wisely, none did. In the 1980s, the Labour government of David Lange wanted to lead the world by banning visits by nuclear-powered ships. This has had as much effect on nuclear powers as a lecture on vegetarianism to a pride of lions.

From the 1990s, New Zealand has hankered to lead the world on climate change. The minister for the environment in the National party government of the 1990s, Simon Upton — who was in many ways a Malcolm Turnbull lookalike — enthusiastically promoted New Zealand’s signature of the Kyoto Protocol in 1998. Helen Clark’s Labour government elected in 1999 ratified Kyoto with equally breathless enthusiasm in 2002, notwithstanding the lack of any supporting analysis that it was in New Zealand’s interest to do so.

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